16 Replies

HP-UX would be neat but that is a VERY rare platform even in the high end shops where it is targetted. AIX is more common and still very high end and rare. I would love to see both but know no one who would consider using them myself.

Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris would be great targets though and I would move to that myself if it was available. Solaris is available for free and is available on commodity hardware so it is more appropriate for small shops.

Along with Solaris, FreeBSD (or *BSD but FreeBSD is the one that matters most) and Mac OSX would be nice to see. I am sure that there are a lot of Mac shops that would be interested.

For Linux, Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu are the only serious enterprise players (with Ubuntu being very much a back-runner.) RH and Suse make up something like 98% of all commercial deployments (for servers.) This includes the large number of CentOS and OpenSUSE deployments that are out there but not Fedora which is meant for testing rather than production.

It would be nice to see a more "business" slant to SpiceWorks 4.0. Not that supporting XP or Vista isn't a great way to get into really small shops that aren't technical enough to run a small server but I think that promoting best practices and serious platforms would behoove everyone in the community.

My preference would be to run on Solaris or Red Hat personally but we are fairly happy running on Windows Server 2003 for the time being.

You are EXTREMELY rare but also surprisingly impressive. My shop HAS HP-UX but not in production, just for testing and development. We are shopping around for a few Itanium-based HP-UX servers right now. We have only PA-RISC at the moment - almost time to retire it as "classic".

Are you using HP-UX primarily or just for a few applications? We use a mix of Red Hat and Solaris for our primary stuff and some Windows 2k3 for .NET Application Servers and AD.

>>Are you using HP-UX primarily or just for a few applications? We use a mix of Red Hat and Solaris for our primary stuff and some Windows 2k3 for .NET Application Servers and AD.

I work at a small/medium (10-11k student pop) university. We have had HP-UX in shop for years. And I should know since I've been at this job since 1990. :)

Our Oracle databases run on HP-UX.

We run a large student application (www.peoplesoft.com that was sucked up by Oracle and is now under their Metalink), an events system (Resource25 by Collegenet), and a couple smaller systems. These are production systems along with additional development, quality assurance, etc. environments.

We have some Itanium systems in place.

We are just about to cut over one of our systems to some new hardware. Sadly, it will be the last for a while, since we are feeling the money crunch and cutbacks as everyone else is.

Spiceworks runs on Windows platforms just fine. 2003/XP and on are fine, I suspect 2000 runs it as well but never tried. You will find that version 4 will only run on Windows machines. I suggest running it in a 2003 or XP Pro install as the way to go.

Due to the backend libraries that Spiceworks uses, it would be possible to run it on Linux/Unix systems, but the codebase would need to be ported to suit. It isn't a small job by any means, and one I am hesitant to really push for. Spiceworks is not a massive company, and have limited resources. I would rather have them make the software better first.

It currently does not use MySQL for a backend database, but that would be the obvious choice in a *nix envrionment. Other things like Ruby On Rails are cross-platform and should be fine on different OS'es. There are other issues like getting WMI scanning capability into a *nix OS, but here are tools out there that could be appropriated for the job.

If we ever do get a *nix capable version of Spiceworks, the biggest benefit would be to then create a Virtual Appliance that would enable anyone with a VMware host (or other virtualisation host after an image conversion) to run Spiceworks in a VM as a click and run proposition. That would be a massive shot in the arm for the testing and probable takeup of the system.

SpiceWorks currently uses SQLite which they have to package on Windows but is included by default in all major Linux distributions. MySQL would be great but does not, in any way, represent a barrier to Unix migration. The database could be left exactly as is. If anything, SQLite is a minor barrier to running SpiceWorks on Windows as it is not included.

The Virtual Image would be great. We would love to run it on Xen on Linux.

SQLite like yes is install in most Linux distributions but needs to be modded slightly to work in the same way as the windows one does

Ruby on rails - Their is a Linux version and everything could be moved so easy

***BUT***

Linux and anything installed on Linux should be open source, no matter how well you try and lock it down due to the way Linux works you can pull the files apart so quickly and rip out all the code needed to copy the software.

This would then

(a) Breach Spiceworks copyright shite

(b) Give people the knowledge and tools to start making and branding their own version.

(3) Add more support issues where people decided to change this little setting and ohh its broken.

(d) A lot more development needed in which could be used clearing the feature request list, making it work faster and become more stable.

(e) Supporting all the distro's people like becomes an arse

(6) Spiceworks scan needs to work solid and better before moving away from windows as coding Linux to windows is harder than windows to windows

If Spiceworks could help get it to work with something like WINE then the source package would stay sealed and the source as safe as on windows. Have a look at topic 2451 - me and HyTeK are trying to get it working. Once installed, working and tested with WINE it could be packaged into a VMWare image for people to use.

OHH and don't say they could package it in VMware for us and then not give the password and encrypt it... cause you can change a Linux password when you can restart and control the VM so quickly, or even reinstall Linux and break the encryption safely...

Well that's how i see it anyway...

A developer may have another more simple reason like the mention of WINE at Spiceworks HQ and the booze comes out...

Then again maybe i shouldn't have mentioned all these points... they may not have realised... my bad

Yes i am one of the few who has Linux servers and a few Linux desktops....

There is ZERO reason why non-open source software cannot be installed on Linux. Anything that can be done on Linux can be done on Windows. This is pure propaganda.

There is also ZERO reason why running in VMWare on Linux is any different than running on Windows. Access to the hardware or the VM gives you root access, period. Whether it is Windows XP or Linux running on top.

What do you think Linux is, some magic hacking tool? If so, why don't I just copy the SpiceWorks executable to my Linux machine and suddenly have access to everything whether it runs locally or not? Because this is all just FUD and this is a technical forum for SpiceWorks users and not your personal soapbox to spread lies. This is completely inappropriate for this forum. We have serious admins here looking for SMB enterprise solutions.

The real reason that SW can't port directly to Linux is because some of the functionality is called to the system .dll files which would have to be translated to UNIX calls or replicated some other way. No portion of the Ruby, the Rails or the database doesn't run on Linux right now.

While getting SpiceWorks to run under Wine is interesting it is definitely not an appropriately enterprise-class solution and if SpiceWorks wants to be a business tool and not a toy then this will remain a community effort and nothing officially sanctioned or supported which makes it nothing more than an interesting aside. Any architectural change could simply break the compatibility and that would be that until someone in the community got it working again.

What we need is a serious enterprise package. Some companies making enterprise strength, non-open source software for Linux (and UNIX in general which all have the same tools) include:

SQLite (the database) - is installed on Linux by default on nearly every distribution. It is fundamental to a lot of applications

.dll’s – Have you heard of WINE? (not the drink) you can use it to register windows dll’s and I can even install Spiceworks using it just not get past the starting screen.

So what was I saying?

To use Ruby on rails in Linux you have to have all your source in plain text files, leaving the source code open to be read and changed, with windows it can be packaged within .exe’s in which are compiled and a lot harder to get to the source code

Trying to lock Linux down so people cannot see these files is hard as there is a back door in (like windows) for when you have forgotten your password. Also passwords can be leaked quickly.

This would leave the source free for people to get to.

I do believe it may be possible to package it all up like they do with Adobe but this would require re writing the whole application in a format for Linux which would be a complete waste of time because any change they make would have be done twice in two different languages as Windows would still be used more than Linux.

Ohh and not meaning to be bitchy but you have 18 contributions to spiceworks community I have how many?

I don’t use the community as my “Personal Sandbox” I was trying to help people understand why it is hard to put a closed source application on Linux.

And Scot I’m sorry if I’m wrong and in fact you can’t run Ruby or SQLite on Linux but I may have done it? I donno I might have just dreamt it though?

We run RoR and SQLite on Linux daily, they definitely work, no one is disputing that, I do not think.

Windows passwords can be broken just as quickly as Linux. If you have access to the hardware then you have access to every file on the box. Period. No exceptions. The files need to be encrypted to prevent this and that is just as easy on Linux as on Windows.

SW is compiled on Windows. It could be compiled on Linux. RubyScript2Exe targets both, just a matter of telling it to make both if that is the tool that they are using.

It is not encrypted in either case. Want to edit the application on Windows and change your branding? Just open it in an editor and there it is - same as on Linux. Anyone with the skills to do that on one platform can do it on the other.

There is no security concerns from one platform to the other.

Wine is not an enterprise platform. Serious shops don't want to run SpiceWorks in this way. It's great for hobbyist who find it interesting but real businesses aren't looking to do this kind of stuff. I'm glad that people are trying it but even if it works great most of us are not going to see that as the solution.